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The Obama administration's useful lie about Iran talks

In this file photo, then-Senator John Kerry, D-Mass., US President Barack Obama's nominee for Secretary of State, arrives with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to give testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee during his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2013.

It has now been revealed that
senior U.S. diplomats—Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Jake
Sullivan, Vice President Joe Biden's top foreign policy
adviser—conducted at least five secret negotiations with Iranian
officials in Oman's capital of Muscat. Top administration nuclear-arms
negotiator Wendy Sherman also participated. Administration officials
later admitted that lower-level talks with Iran commenced in 2011 and
occurred in Muscat.

This
information now awkwardly marring the transparency table, Rosen
reasonably asked Psaki if it is the "policy" of the State Department to
"lie" to keep secret talks under wraps. "There are times when diplomacy
needs privacy in order to progress," Psaki said.

The
lie matters less than the investment in the talks themselves. They
began when the U.S. was still fighting in Iraq, Iran's belligerence
there and across the region was legitimately feared, and Iranian
strongman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was bellicose and manic.

The
March talks intensified before the June election of new Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani, meaning the Obama administration believed
enough had been achieved with Iran's old guard that it could possibly
seal a deal this year. Also, the talks continued even as the White House
successfully pushed for tougher sanctions, imposed by its international
partners and Congress. This belies the overheated assumptions back in
September at the United Nations that Rouhani and his widely traveled
foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, by themselves were paving the
way toward a thaw in relations and a possible phase-one nuclear deal.

That
means the White House has been playing the long game for some time,
secretly talking and publicly sanctioning along the way. The
administration can be accused of many things, but naivete and
gullibility cannot be among them. They know the old and new Iranian
guard and talked up to and around Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei—measuring his intentions, ambitions, and boundaries. From such
calculations, big deals can be made. And the fact that the
administration took these long-running measurements means it is not, as
some have accused, falling for a fanciful Rouhani/Zarif "charm
offensive."

That doesn't mean the phase-one deal is an unvarnished success or unmitigated disaster.
It is a product of continuously sifted calculations on both sides, and
it most conspicuously illustrates the limits of sustained economic and
diplomatic pressure applied by the P5+1. As the White House has made
abundantly clear, these negotiating partners—Russia, China, Britain,
France, and Germany—had reached their own limits of isolating,
punishing, and prodding Iran. Negotiations carried out with such
partners, by their very nature, constrain U.S. interests.

Russia
has long-standing economic and foreign policy interests, some of which
conflict with ours. Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon
influences China's calculus in dealing with a nuclearized North Korea
and its now publicly declared intent to extend naval influence in the
South China Sea. Again, China's aims are not the same as ours. Keeping
these two nations in the P5+1 harness was becoming increasingly
complicated, as was maintaining European buy-in on economic sanctions
that denied Britain, France, and Germany millions in commerce they
eventually want to recoup.

Plus,
the pace and invisibility of Iran's uranium enrichment made the threat
of it crossing the "breakout" threshold too dangerous and real to
ignore. For the White House, the time for a time-out was now. Waiting
longer could have left the world, the region, and Israel with an
untenable nuclear fait accompli.

That
doesn't mean there are not trap doors, the biggest of which concerns
possible Iranian recipients of the estimated $7 billion in sanctions
relief Iran will now enjoy. As Der Spiegel points
out, those now unfrozen funds, or some of them, could wind up in the
hands of the National Development Fund, a benign-sounding entity that
Western intelligence agencies suspect supports two nefarious entities:
Novin Energy, a secretive part of Iran's feared nuclear-weapons program,
and the Quds Force,
a nasty cell within the Iranian Revolutionary Guards with a history of
anti-Western terrorist training missions and campaigns (it's currently
fighting to protect Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad).

What
becomes of Iran's phase-one financial relief is a crucial issue for the
U.S. to weigh—in addition to requiring full compliance with the new
inspection protocols of Iranian enrichment facilities and the Arak heavy-water nuclear reactor.

This
is why Congress is watching and threatening to wield the threat of
tougher economic sanctions even as the initial deal begins to be
implemented. The House passed its bill in August,
and it sits as a ready cudgel on the desk of Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, D-N.J., should Iran dissemble or
backslide. While the White House makes great sport of
opposing new economic sanctions, the threat reminds Iran about the
price of noncompliance—and that the U.S. can and will assert its
sovereign foreign policy goals even if Russia, China, and Europe go
economically and geopolitically wobbly.

The
administration told what it considered a useful lie about secret talks
with Iran. The key to phase one of the Iran deal is for the White House
to tell no lies to itself now about Iran's actions. It's equally
important the administration not lie to itself about the value of its
cloak-and-dagger diplomacy. Just because it got us here doesn't mean it
can get us to an Iran that abandons its equally secretive pursuit of
nuclear weapons.